Core Prelims lectures on Moral Philosophy (via Mill’s Utilitarianism) Michaelmas Term 2013 Dr Hilary Greaves Lecture 1: Theories of well-being I: Hedonism 0. Admin a. These are the core lectures for the Prelims/Mods option in ‘Moral Philosophy’. Edward Harcourt will offer a second set of core lectures for the same option next term. Each is intended to be a ‘complete’ introduction to the syllabus material, but they are not duplicates (you can choose to go to either or both sets of lectures). b. The Faculty reading list for this paper is available on Weblearn (philosophy website - > undergraduate -> reading lists -> Mods and prelims reading lists -> Moral philosophy reading list). c. References to Mill’s Utilitarianism are given in the form ‘U [Chapter].[paragraph]’: e.g. ‘U 2.10’ refers to the 10 th paragraph of chapter 2. 1. Some remarks on the context, and lecture outline a. The basic questions of (normative) ethics are “What should I do?” and “How should I live?” b. Utilitarianism is an attempt to answer these questions. i. Its answer places great emphasis on the notions of happiness/pleasure, and unhappiness/pain. ii. Example: I ought to give the best set of lectures on Mill that I’m able to prepare in the time available. 1. But why ought I to do this? A shallow (?) answer might just say: As students admitted to (and paying fees to!) Oxford University, you have a right to an excellent education, and as a lecturer here I have a duty to provide you with that. 2. A utilitarian would not be satisfied with this sort of answer. She might be thinking instead: It’s good if you lot understand Mill and utilitarian theory as well as possible. It’s good if the lectures help you to develop your critical skills, by providing a good example. And it’s good if you enjoy the lectures, so I shouldn’t make them too boring. 3. For the first of those two ‘good things’ – understanding utilitarianism and developing critical skills – we might go on to ask, in turn, why those things are good. a. It’s good if you understand utilitarianism so that in your private lives, and in your future careers, you’re more likely to act in ways that make other people happy. Also, properly understanding such a beautiful theory is itself an exquisite intellectual pleasure for you, even aside from its consequences on your action.
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Core Prelims lectures on Moral Philosophy (via Mill’s Utilitarianism)
Michaelmas Term 2013
Dr Hilary Greaves
Lecture 1: Theories of well-being I: Hedonism
0. Admin
a. These are the core lectures for the Prelims/Mods option in ‘Moral Philosophy’.
Edward Harcourt will offer a second set of core lectures for the same option next
term. Each is intended to be a ‘complete’ introduction to the syllabus material, but
they are not duplicates (you can choose to go to either or both sets of lectures).
b. The Faculty reading list for this paper is available on Weblearn (philosophy website -
> undergraduate -> reading lists -> Mods and prelims reading lists -> Moral
philosophy reading list).
c. References to Mill’s Utilitarianism are given in the form ‘U [Chapter].[paragraph]’:
e.g. ‘U 2.10’ refers to the 10th paragraph of chapter 2.
1. Some remarks on the context, and lecture outline
a. The basic questions of (normative) ethics are “What should I do?” and “How should I
live?”
b. Utilitarianism is an attempt to answer these questions.
i. Its answer places great emphasis on the notions of happiness/pleasure, and
unhappiness/pain.
ii. Example: I ought to give the best set of lectures on Mill that I’m able to
prepare in the time available.
1. But why ought I to do this? A shallow (?) answer might just say: As
students admitted to (and paying fees to!) Oxford University, you
have a right to an excellent education, and as a lecturer here I have
a duty to provide you with that.
2. A utilitarian would not be satisfied with this sort of answer. She
might be thinking instead: It’s good if you lot understand Mill and
utilitarian theory as well as possible. It’s good if the lectures help
you to develop your critical skills, by providing a good example. And
it’s good if you enjoy the lectures, so I shouldn’t make them too
boring.
3. For the first of those two ‘good things’ – understanding
utilitarianism and developing critical skills – we might go on to ask,
in turn, why those things are good.
a. It’s good if you understand utilitarianism so that in your
private lives, and in your future careers, you’re more likely
to act in ways that make other people happy. Also, properly
understanding such a beautiful theory is itself an exquisite
intellectual pleasure for you, even aside from its
consequences on your action.
b. It’s good to develop your critical thinking skills, because that
makes you more effective in whatever you try to do – and,
hopefully, most things you try to do will be things that make
yourselves and others happier...
i. Exception: If you were a budding master criminal,
then it wouldn’t be good to hone your critical
thinking skills!
c. Utilitarians are often driven partly by the thought that one
can always ask why something is good, unless the thing in
question is happiness/pleasure/enjoyment.
i. If it isn’t itself happiness, the thing is (according to
utilitarians!) good at most in an instrumental sense
– it has (at most) instrumental value. That is, its
goodness consists in its tendency to bring about
some further thing that’s good, and Thing 1 is good
only insofar as Thing 2 is good (and only insofar as
Thing 1 really does tend to bring about Thing 2).
ii. Utilitarians think that
1. all such ‘chains of instrumental goods’ end
eventually at instances of
happiness/pleasure/enjoyment;
2. there’s no answer to be given to “why is
happiness good” other than “it just is”.
Happiness has final value - so this is where
the chains of ‘explaining why something is
good’ stop.
4. How these lines of thoughts relate to considerations of rights/duties
is an interesting question – of which more later!
iii. The idea that what one ought to do is intimately related to considerations of
the “pleasure and pain” or “happiness and unhappiness” that would result
from one’s action is not a new one. Indeed, every remotely sane theory of
ethics, throughout history, has counted this at least one part of the story.
What’s distinctive about its answer is that it reduces questions of what to
do/how to live entirely to empirical questions of what will maximise
happiness/pleasure, and minimise unhappiness/pain.
iv. This is both the feature that draws utilitarianism’s supporters to the theory,
and the feature that objectors find to be (on reflection) totally unacceptable.
1. Your task: Figure out where you stand on this!
c. We will study the theory of utilitarianism primarily via the work of John Stuart Mill.
i. Mill was a 19th century philosopher, political theorist, economist and civil
servant. (1806-1873)
ii. His father was James Mill, a close friend and associate of the famous
utilitarian Jeremy Bentham.
iii. James Mill brought his son up with the deliberate aim of creating a “genius
intellect” that would carry on Bentham’s work of developing and advocating
for utilitarianism.
iv. This involved an extremely rigorous programme of home schooling,
including beginning studies in Greek at the age of three. By the age of
fourteen, Mill was attending university courses in chemistry, zoology, logic
and higher mathematics, in France, and associating with many of his father’s
political allies.
v. But it seems to have worked!
1. Mill started publishing writings on ethical theory and practice at the
age of fourteen.
2. Utilitarianism was first published in 1861 (when Mill was 55).
3. Mill’s writing on utilitarianism is prompted by criticisms that
Bentham’s version of utilitarianism had received.
vi. Utilitarianism is intended for a general audience. (It was originally published
in serial form, in Fraser magazine, and only afterwards reprinted in book
form.) This is worth bearing in mind when you read it. It is not, for example,
anything like as clear as one would like, on several points of detail that are
crucial to the serious student of utilitarianism; and, as we’ll see, some of
Mill’s moves are made for rhetorical effect, rather than as presentations of a
carefully considered case. It is rather focussed on defending the general idea
and emphasising the big picture.
1. Scholars continue to this day to debate how Mill’s Utilitarianism
ought to be interpreted. (In your tutorials, you might look into some
of these debates.)
2. For our purposes, Mill’s vagueness on these points is actually rather
helpful: we will use his book as a jumping-off point to investigate
the alternatives, and think about what the most plausible version of
utilitarianism is.
d. Outline of these lectures
i. Week 1: Theories of well-being I: Hedonism
ii. Week 2: Theories of well-beingII: Desire-satisfaction and objective-list
theories
iii. Week 3: Theories of the good (utilitarianism and alternatives); Criteria of
right action I: Act-consequentialism
iv. Week 4: Criteria of right action II: Rule-consequentialism, Mill’s account,
non-consequentialist theories
v. Week 5: Meta-ethics I: Mill on moral motivation and moral epistemology
vi. Week 6: Meta-ethics II: Meta-ethical realism and alternatives
vii. Week 7: Mill on justice and rights
viii. Week 8: Two-level consequentialism and global consequentialism
2. ‘Theories of well-being’: Candidates answers to the question ‘What makes a person’s life go
well for her?’
a. In particular: Is it really only happiness that (ultimately) matters, for that purpose?
i. A positive answer to this question is the first thing that distinguishes
utilitarians from many of their opponents.
b. Clarification of the question
i. There is one clear sense in which a person’s life uncontroversially ‘goes well’
if that person does great things for others: e.g. discovers a cure for cancer,
brings universal primary education to the populace of an impoverished
country, abolishes slavery, etc. That sense is: this person’s life improves the
overall state of the world, so it is a good thing that this person lived.
ii. But such a life might not be good for the person living it. It might just be
good for other people. (Suppose, e.g., that the person never found out that
he had discovered the cure for cancer, that he did not himself either enjoy
or see any value in his research, that his work was not appreciated in his
own lifetime – indeed, suppose that by some terrible misunderstanding his
work led to him being widely ridiculed and even punished during his
lifetime. In that case, it would at least be highly controversial to claim that
his life was good for him.)
iii. We need to have an account of what it is for someone’s life to be good for
them before we are in a position to consider what it is for someone’s life to
go well overall (since we don’t know how good it is, e.g., that a cure for
cancer is discovered, or that a beautiful artwork is produced, unless we
know to what extent this improves the lives of the people who benefit from
it – for instance, how much health and length of life contribute to well-
being.)
c. Hedonism: What’s good for a person is for her life to contain as much happiness and
as little unhappiness as possible.
i. Motivations
1. Similar to the above thought-experiment: Choose any action you
find yourself doing for non-moral reasons – reasons that we might
call ‘selfish’, in a non-derogatory sense – and that, on reflection, you
still think is a good idea. Ask yourself: why are you doing it? In most
(all?) such cases, you can find a plausible line of ‘why’-answers that
ends with: “because I want to be happy/I don’t want to be
unhappy”. And that appears (?) to be where the line of explanation
stops. (Try it!)
2. “Pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as
ends; and... all desirable things... are desirable either for the
pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of
pleasure and the prevention of pain.” (U 2.2)
ii. Versions of hedonism
1. ‘Caricature’ hedonism (‘sensualism’): Only bodily pleasures and
pains count
a. The word ‘hedonism’ in popular culture often connotes this
version of hedonism: it’s all about food, drink, sex, massages
from gorgeous and scantily clad guys/girls...
b. Not a straw man! “Fill your belly. Day and night make merry.
Let days be full of joy. Dance and make music day and night
[...] These things alone are the concern of men” (from the
Epic of Gilgamesh, c.1800 BCE))
2. Making hedonism more plausible: Include intellectual and other
mental pleasures. Examples:
a. Reading poetry
b. Social pleasures: the pleasures of good conversation, and
the feelings of true friendship/romantic love
c. Creative pleasures: composing or playing music,
programming computers, making handicrafts
d. A sense of satisfaction: e.g. at writing a book or climbing a
mountain
3. Few people would really be satisfied – “happy” – with the life
recommended by crude hedonism.
a. Hedonism (and hence utilitarianism) has sometimes been
criticises as “a doctrine worthy only of swine”: one that
ignores the fact that the ways in which a human life can be
good far outstrip the ‘mere pleasures’ to which other
animals are susceptible.
b. But this criticism applies only to an overly crude, sensualist
version of hedonism.
4. Bentham’s “hedonic calculus”
a. For every pleasure and every pain, note its duration, and its
intensity (how pleasurable or how painful it is). Work out
the value of a pleasure by multiplying its duration and its
intensity; append a minus sign when dealing with pains.
Then add up all the pleasures and pains that a given action
will cause, to work out the overall value of the action.
b. NB This includes *all* pleasures and pains, not only the
‘sensual’ ones
c. Example: Climbing a mountain
i. Suppose that you don’t actually enjoy the process of
climbing the mountain, at the time – you’re only in
it for the sense of achievement. To work out
whether or not it is a good idea for you to climb a
given mountain, work out how long it would take
you to climb it, and what the intensity of the
displeasure (‘pain’) that you would experience
during the climb. (If the level of displeasure varies
during the climb, split the journey into several bits,
account for each separately and then add the
results.) This is the total cost of climbing the
mountain. Then estimate how intense the pleasure
is that you would get from a sense of satisfaction at
having climbed it. Crucially, remember to take
account of how long that lasts, too. If there are
other reasons for the climb, e.g. you would enjoy
chatting in the pub with your mates more if you had
some mountain-climbing stories to boast about,
then count the duration and intensity of those, too;
if there are further knock-on effects due to your
friends respecting you more, count them too. You
should climb the mountain only if the total amount
by which it increases your pleasure level is greater
than the total amount by which it increases your
pain or ‘displeasure’ level.
d. Note that the recommendation needn’t be that people
actually carry out this calculation, for every decision they
take.
i. A good thing, since such calculations would be
horrifically complex.
ii. Rather, it provides something to aim at, and
something that one’s decision-making reasoning
might hope to approximate.
iii. An exercise: Think through what Bentham’s
“hedonic calculus” would recommend in a particular
example of an action you have chosen to do, or not
to do. On reflection, do you think the
recommendations of the hedonic calculus are
reasonable?
e. This calculus can explain why intellectual pleasures are more
valuable than more mundane pleasures – when they are!
i. To some people, at any rate, they simply provide
more pleasure – because the pleasure is more
intense, because it lasts longer, or both.
ii. They’re relatively cheap: it doesn’t require much
outlay of pain to deliver them to a large number of
people (in contrast to, e.g., fine dinners).
iii. Relatedly: It’s harder for unfortunate external
circumstances to take them away.
1. One might fall on hard times and not be
able to afford material luxuries. But no
ordinary misfortune (but cf. dementia, etc.)
can rob one of one’s sense of satisfaction,
or enjoyment of contemplation.
f. But also, Bentham insists that intellectual pleasures aren’t
always more valuable, and that it’s mere snobbery to insist
otherwise. The ultimate tribunal is which activity provides
the more pleasure.
i. "The utility of all these arts and sciences,-I speak
both of those of amusement and curiosity,-the value
which they possess, is exactly in proportion to the
pleasure they yield. ... Prejudice apart, the game of
push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences
of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish
more pleasure, it is more valuable than either.
Everybody can play at push-pin: poetry and music
are relished only by a few. ... If poetry and music
deserve to be preferred before a game of push-pin,
it must be because they are calculated to gratify
those individuals who are most difficult to be
pleased." (Bentham, The rationale of reward, 1825)
d. Mill’s version of hedonism: the distinction between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ pleasures
i. Mill notes the possibility, and the sufficiency, of a Benthamite defence of
intellectual pleasures, but proposes instead to “take the higher ground” – to
offer a defence of the superiority of higher pleasures according to which
that superiority is more of a fundamental affair, not simply a result of
contingent facts about which pleasures happen to be cheaper and longer-
lasting.
ii. And there’s independent reason to expect this “higher-ground” defence to
be correct: “It would be absurd to suggest that while, in estimating all other
things, quality is considered as well as quantity, the estimation of pleasures
should be supposed to depend on quantity alone.” (U 2.4)
iii. Some pleasures are just more valuable (“higher”) than others.
1. So, according to Mill, poetry is more valuable than pushpin, even if
the quantity of pleasure they generate is the same, because poetry
generates pleasure of higher quality.
2. But what does this mean, and what exactly is the rule for when one
pleasure is better than another?
3. Sometimes, Mill seems to suggest that a ‘higher’ pleasure is to be
lexically preferred to a ‘lower’ one – meaning that it is always better
to have more of the higher pleasure, regardless of how great the
cost in sacrifices of lower pleasure is.
a. ‘Lexical’ orderings: as in a dictionary, where, if the first letter
of one word is earlier in the alphabet than the first letter of
another word, you don’t even need to look at the words’
second letters: the first letter is lexically more important
than the second, in determining the order in which the
words appear in the dictionary. The second letter becomes
relevant only if the two words are tied as regards their first
letters.
b. On this interpretation, if reading poetry is a higher pleasure
than drinking beer, it would be worth giving up beer for
one’s whole life, in order to get to read poetry for even one
extra second.
i. Surely that is absurd??
c. Crisp (in his ‘Routledge philosophy guidebook to Mill on
utilitarianism’) interprets Mill as making this claim.
4. Other times Mill makes a more modest claim: merely that a given
quantity of a higher pleasure is much more valuable than the same
quantity of a lower pleasure.
a. The modest claim is much more plausible.
i. The pleasure you gain from reading another
philosophy article might be more valuable than
going out for a beer once, but it’s not so much more
valuable that it’s worth foregoing an entire
lifetime’s worth of pub visits for it.
b. But even the modest version will be contested!
i. Would you really prefer reading another article
except insofar as you thought that in the long run,
that would lead to more total pleasure?
ii. And this modest version opens hedonism up to a
powerful objection that the lexical version of the
view avoids...
5. ...The problem of Haydn and the oyster
a. Thought-experiment: Would you prefer the life of an oyster
to the 77-year life of Haydn, provided that the oyster life
was sufficiently long?
b. Objection to hedonism: Hedonists have to say ‘yes’. But
that’s crazy.
c. Possible reply: A version of hedonism that treats higher
pleasures as lexically better than lower ones does not have
the consequence that the oyster’s life is better than
Haydn’s. (But, as we’ve seen above, the lexical version is
problematic for other reasons.)
d. Other examples in the same sort of spirit: you have had a
bad road accident. Your brain is damaged in such a way that
it will pack up in two years if nothing is done. (Those two
years would, however, be two years of fairly normal life.)
Surgeons ask whether you would like them to operate. The
operation will restore to you a normal lifespan. The catch is
that it will almost entirely remove your intellectual abilities,
leaving you to live the life only of an infant.
i. Quite aside from issues of being a burden on others,
it’s not immediately clear which of these outcomes
is better *for you*. The issue turns on the relative
value of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ pleasures. (Mill would,
presumably, always decline the operation - ?)
6. Both interpretations are suggested in a single sentence when Mill
writes: “If one of the two [pleasures, e.g. poetry and push-pin] is, by
those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far
above the other that they prefer it, even though knowing it to be
attended with a greater quantity of discontent, and would not
resign it for any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is
capable of, we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a
superiority in quality, so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in
comparison, of small account.”
a. The “for any quantity” strongly implies the lexical view.
b. The “of small account” fairly strongly suggests the more
modest view (why not say: of no account?)
c. So it’s not clear how to interpret Mill here.
7. Mill sometimes writes as though the higher/lower distinction
coincides with the intellectual/sensual distinction. (This would make
the distinction a two-category affair.)
a. On reflection, this is clearly too simplistic to be plausible.
One can distinguish between pleasures of more ‘animalistic’
and those of more ‘refined’ type, even within each of the
categories (intellectual, sensual).
i. Example within the intellectual sphere: fine
appreciation of poetry or philosophy vs. reading a
trashy novel
ii. Example within the sensual sphere: chips and
cheese vs a dinner at Le Manoir
b. One might offer Mill a modification: pleasures are arrayed
along a continuous scale in terms of quality, rather than
simply being “high” or “low”
i. For our example above: Perhaps: chips and cheese is
the lowest, then the trashy novel, then the fine
dinner, and poetry appreciation is the highest.
c. Note that this modification makes the “lexical” view even
more implausible than it would be on a “two-category”
interpretation.
8. How can we know when one pleasure is ‘more valuable’ than
another?
a. Mill’s answer: by seeing what people who are fully
acquainted with both types of pleasure prefer. “From this
verdict of the only competent judges, I apprehend there can
be no appeal. On a question which is the best worth having
of two pleasures, or which of two modes of existence is the
most grateful to the feelings, apart from its moral attributes
and from its consequences, the judgment of those who are
qualified by knowledge of both, or, if they differ, that of the
majority among them, must be admitted as final.” (U 2.8)
i. (Note the anti-intuitionist flavour of this remark.)
ii. Mill would give the same reply to the assessment of
which of two pleasures/pains of the same ‘quality’ is
more intense.
b. Example: Eating chocolate vs reading Tolstoy.
i. Perhaps a competent judge would never give up
reading Tolstoy for chocolate, regardless of the
(quality or) amount of chocolate involved, or of the
timespan over which he would get to enjoy the
chocolate.
c. Mill admits that some people prefer beer to poetry, fine
food to creative pursuits, sex to true love. But he thinks that
that only happens when the person in question is not
familiar with – perhaps because she is unable to experience
– the ‘higher’ pleasure in question.
i. “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a
pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than
a fool satisfied. And if the pig, or the fool, are of a
different opinion, it is because they only know their
side of the question. The other party to the
comparison knows both sides.” (U 2.6)
d. Objection: It’s just not true that ‘competent judges’ always
prefer a higher to a lower pleasure. Even the most
dedicated philosophy student sometimes prefers going for a
beer to reading a philosophy article.
i. Mill’s reply: This might happen because the student
has already read so much philosophy that she has
become temporarily incapable of gaining much
pleasure from yet another article. Otherwise, while
the student might choose the beer over the article,
it’s not clear that she really judges it to be more
valuable. She might be choosing it merely from
“temptation” and “infirmity of character”.
1. This sort of thing happens all the time: cf.
failed attempts to lose weight.
2. “It may be questioned whether any one
who has remained equally susceptible to
both classes of pleasures, ever knowingly
and calmly preferred the lower.” (U 2.7)
3. Exercise 3: is this always what’s going on
when you choose one of Mill’s “lower”
pleasures over a “higher” one?
9. Problems with the “test by appeal to the competent judges”
a. It’s not clear that there are really any competent judges. The
intelligent person may know what it’s like for him to eat
chips and cheese, but he doesn’t know what it’s like to live
the life of the ‘fool’ (or to experience eating chips and
cheese as the ‘fool’ experiences it).
b. Is it supposed to apply to thought-experiments involving
foregoing a pleasure of one (“higher”) type altogether in
order to increase access to pleasures of another (“lower”)
type, or are the relevant thought-experiments instead ones
involving forgoing a “higher” pleasure on one occasion in
order to increase access to a “lower” pleasure?
i. It’s very plausible that the two questions would
receive different answers. I wouldn’t give up reading
Tolstoy altogether, i.e. choose a life in which I never
read Tolstoy, just for more chocolate. But I might
well skip one Tolstoy novel, or one instance of re-
reading Tolstoy, for more access to (esp. fine)
chocolate.
iv. Another ‘objection’ to Mill on higher and lower pleasures: This aspect of
Mill’s doctrine amounts to abandoning hedonism - the view that only
pleasure matters.
1. Sidgwick: “if... what we are seeking is pleasure as such, and pleasure
alone, we must evidently prefer the more pleasant pleasure to the
less pleasant: no other choice seems reasonable, unless we are
aiming at something besides pleasure.” (Sidgwick 1907, pp.94-5)
a. Doubts about this argument:
i. One can be seeking money and money alone (from
one’s job, say), without necessarily always
preferring more money to less. (It might be, e.g.,
that beyond a certain threshold one doesn’t care
whether or not one earns yet more money.)
ii. Similarly: If I am lonely, I might go to the pub
seeking company and company alone, but that does
not entail that I care only about the quantity of
company (how many people I run into, and how
long they spend talking with me?), and not at all
about its quality (how well I know and like the
people, how interesting the conversations are).
iii. So there is no true general principle to the effect of
“if you are seeking X alone, then you must always
prefer more X to less”. Why think that the particular
instance of this principle, with “X” replaced by
“pleasure”, is true? (To put the question another
way: What true general principle is it an instance
of?)
2. Moore: “If one pleasure can differ from another in quality, that
means, that a pleasure is something complex, something composed,
in fact, of pleasure in addition to that which produces pleasure. ...
Mill... in admitting that a sensual indulgence can be directly judged
to be lower than another pleasure, in which the degree of pleasure
involved may be the same, is admitting that other things may be
good or bad, quite independently of the pleasure that accompanies
them.” (Moore, 1903, sec. 48)
a. Doubts about this argument: Mill needn’t agree with Moore
that “a pleasure is... composed... of pleasure in addition to
that which produces pleasure”, and that differences in
“quality of pleasure” just are differences in what produces
the pleasure. He could simply hold that the pleasure itself
has a complex structure, including quality in addition to
quantity, and that both aspects of its structure matter.
3. In any case: Moore and Sidgwick, along with many others, have
concluded that a higher/lower distinction along the lines of Mill’s is
inconsistent with hedonism. (Sidgwick rejects the higher/lower
distinction; Moore rejects hedonism.) (See also Crisp, pp. 32-4.)
4. A simpler argument: Hedonism just is the view that the best life (for
the person living it) is the one that contains the greatest net
quantity of pleasure. Therefore, in holding that not only quantity but
also ‘quality’ matters, Mill is clearly abandoning hedonism.
a. But this argument turns the issue into a merely verbal one,
turning directly on the stipulative definition of “hedonism”.
Mill needn’t care about merely verbal issues.
e. The master objection to hedonism: The experience machine
i. Thought-experiment: Would you enter Nozick’s ‘experience machine’? (Cf.
Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp.42-5)
ii. Objection to hedonism: Hedonists have to say yes. But that’s crazy (?).
iii. Hedonists (have to) ‘bite this bullet’ (i.e., accept a consequence that many
people would regard as implausible). But note that many hedonists do so
quite cheerfully.
iv. Related (real-life, non-science-fiction) issues
1. Is it bad for you if, unbeknownst to you, your best friends bitch
about you behind your back?
a. Hedonists have to say ‘no’, provided that the bitching really
is in secret, does not affect how the friends behave to your
face, does not affect whether they invite you to events, etc.
b. Against the hedonist position on this issue: Most people
would be very upset even if they found out years later, of
friends they no longer had contact with, that this had
happened. If the bitching isn’t bad for one, then being upset
about it seems irrational. But being upset in this case does
not seem to be irrational.
Lecture 2: Theories of individual welfare II: Desire-satisfaction and objective-list theories
3. Recap: The experience-machine objection to hedonism
a. It seems(?) plausible that the life of someone in an experience machine is not going
as well for that person as an experientially identical non-machine life.
b. What’s missing?
i. The person in the experience machine might be having experiences as of
climbing Everest, having wonderful friends and family, wiping out world
poverty, etc. But she doesn’t actually have any friends, isn’t actually in
contact with any of her family, and hasn’t actually achieved any of the things
she thinks she’s achieved.
ii. What she wanted was not just to have experiences that were as if she was
climbing a mountain/having great friends/reforming a country/etc, but
actually to do those things.
iii. This suggests that what’s missing from the hedonist theory of individual
welfare is: Due attention to whether the person’s desires are really satisfied.
c. This line of thought motivates the desire-satisfaction (or preference-satisfaction)
theory of individual welfare.
4. Desire-satisfaction theory: What’s good for a person is for her desires to be satisfied to the
greatest degree possible.
a. Some examples to illustrate what this means in practice
i. Our character in the experience machine would have had a good life if she
really had had lots of close friends, spent lots of time with family, climbed a
mountain and eradicated world poverty (or most of those).
ii. Reading poetry makes Mill’s life better, because he wants to read poetry.
But reading poetry wouldn’t make the life of a hamburger-eating bricklayer
with no desire to read poetry any better.
iii. Your life goes better for you if you get a First Class degree if, and then only
because, you want to get a First Class Degree (or you want to do some
things that getting a First will help to cause, e.g. earning ridiculous amounts
of money, or pursuing a research career). If you don’t happen to want any of
those things, then getting a First wouldn’t make your life any better.
iv. Pleasure is good for most of us. But, according to the desire-satisfaction
theory, that’s just because most of us happen to want pleasure.
1. If there is, somewhere in some monastery, a monk who has
managed to transform his psychology to such an extent that he
really doesn’t care at all about pleasure, then experiencing pleasure
would not make his life better.
b. An initial worry about the desire-satisfaction theory: misguided desires
i. Suppose that I want to get to Cardiff by 9.30pm tonight, in order to have tea
with my mother before she goes to bed. Because of this, I have formed a
desire to catch the 6 o’clock train out of Oxford. And indeed I do catch that
train. But as things turn out, the 6 o’clock train is delayed for two hours by
signal failure at Swindon, and doesn’t arrive in Cardiff until 10.15. The 7pm
train – which I would have caught if I’d missed the 6 o’clock – suffers no
such delay, and arrives at 9.15.
ii. It doesn’t seem plausible to say that in this scenario, catching the 6 o’clock
train makes my life go better, for me – it just had the result that I sat on a
train for 4 hours and missed my mother entirely.
iii. But I did have a desire to catch the 6pm train! So doesn’t the desire-
satisfaction theory entail that catching that train is indeed good for me?
iv. Obvious reply: My desire to catch the 6pm train doesn’t count, for the
purposes of determining what’s good for me. I only *had* that desire
because I thought it would serve another, more fundamental desire I had,
viz. the desire to see my mother – and that belief turned out to be mistaken.
v. Clarifying this reply:
1. The point is that the desire-satisfaction theorist needs a distinction
between instrumental and final desires.
2. A final desire for X is a desire for X just for its own sake. An
instrumental desire for X is a desire for X that one holds only
because one believes that X is a causal means to securing Y, and one
has a desire for Y (which latter may be another instrumental desire,
or a final desire).
3. This is very similar to the distinction that the hedonist needed to
draw between things that are good in themselves (have ‘final
value’), and things that are good because they are causal means to
other good things (they have ‘instrumental value’). (Recall that to be
at all plausible, the hedonist needed his claim to be that only
pleasure has final value, not that only pleasure has value full stop.)
vi. Clarified version of desire-satisfaction theory: A person’s life goes well for
him to the extent that his final desires are satisfied.
c. The arithmetic of the desire-satisfaction theory
i. How do we determine ‘the extent to which someone’s final desires are
satisfied’?
ii. Attempt #1: Count his desires. The goodness of a life is just the number of
satisfied desires it contains.
iii. An objection to the ‘just count’ version: Surely the strength of the desires
matters too?
1. E.g. If I have a very strong desire to climb a mountain, and two very
mild desires (say, for a chocolate ice cream and to stroke a cat),
surely it can be better for me to have one stronger desire satisfied
than to have two weaker desires satisfied.
2. This suggests an alternative ‘arithmetic of desires’, something like:
Assign to each desire an intensity. Add up the intensities of the
satisfied desires within the life you are evaluating. The resulting
figure is the measure of how good the life is for the person living it.
a. This is a bit like the Benthamite ‘hedonic calculus’ method of
adding up pleasures.
b. This analogy also suggests: perhaps the length of time you
held the desire for matters too: long-lasting desires count
for more than short-lived desires.
d. Objections to desire-satisfaction theory: surely not all desires (not even all final
desires) count?
i. Other-regarding desires
1. Very few people are completely selfish. Suppose I have a desire that
tropical diseases in the third world are eradicated. It doesn’t seem
to follow that, if those diseases are indeed eradicated, that makes
my life better. But according to desire-satisfaction theory, that
would follow.
2. A possible reply: if I’m deeply committed to the project of
eradicating poverty – if, say, a large part of my life’s work has been
dedicated to that cause – then it’s not so implausible to say that my
life goes better if the goals of that project turn out to be fulfilled.
3. Rejoinder: But other-regarding desires can occur even where there
is no plausible “project” story to tell. E.g. Suppose that I meet a
stranger on a train, and, chatting with him, form a strong desire that
he should flourish. We then part ways, and I never see or indeed
think of him again. Unbeknownst to me, he does flourish. It is not at
all plausible to say that this makes my life go better.
ii. Immoral desires
1. Suppose that Jim is a sadist, and strongly desires that others suffer
pain. It does not make Jim’s life go better if others do indeed suffer
pain (at any rate: if he does not get to witness their pain).
2. Objection: Our ‘not good!!’ gut reaction to this case is a result of the
tendency of Jim’s character to make the lives of others go badly,
perhaps together with the thought that Jim doesn’t deserve to have
his desires satisfied. It need not be taken as a reliable indication that
the fulfilment of Jim’s sadistic desires does not contribute to making
Jim’s life go well for him.
e. Modified version of desire-satisfaction theory: a person’s life goes well for him to
the extent to which his self-regarding preferences, i.e. preferences regarding his
own life, are satisfied. (Parfit calls this the ‘success theory’.)
i. A preliminary problem with this theory: Which desires count as being ‘about
my own life’? Some unclear cases:
1. Desires for the success of my projects:
a. If I have spent much of my life working to eradicate poverty,
does it make my life go better if my efforts succeed, even if
the success is unknown to me e.g. because it postdates my
death?
b. Parfit’s example: If I have a strong desire to be a successful
parent and if one of my children’s lives goes badly as a result
of my parenting mistakes, that makes my life worse even for
me (not just: for my child). (Hence Parfit would also answer
‘yes’ to the question in (a) above.)
i. In contrast, Parfit *doesn’t* think that if one of my
children is killed in an avalanche, but I never find
out, that that makes my life go worse for me – even
if one of my strongest desires is that my children
flourish.
ii. If that’s right, then the connection to the agent’s
own projects – to things that she hoped to do or
achieve – is crucial, in drawing the line between
desires whose satisfaction does improve one’s life
and desires whose satisfaction does not.
ii. But anyway, there seem to be some preferences that are uncontroversially
‘about my own life’, but whose satisfaction still doesn’t make my life go
better. If that’s so, then success theory cannot be correct either.
1. Irrational desires
a. Basic thought: Some desires are irrational, and it doesn’t
make one’s life go better to have one’s irrational desires
satisfied (instead, one’s life would be made better just by
getting rid of the irrational desire).
b. Example 1: the drug addict
i. Suppose an addict has a strong desire for a heroin
shot. But suppose also that getting the shot, while it
brings temporary relief and some transient
pleasure, would only fuel his addiction, making
future episodes of unfulfilled craving more extreme,
and reducing his chances of getting off the drug and
getting his life back on the rails. It seems distinctly
odd (doesn’t it??) to say that getting the shot makes
his life go better for him, just because it satisfied his
desire (this particular ‘desire’ might more naturally
be called: a craving).
ii. A possible response to the drug-addict case: the
drug addict has desires that conflict with one
another. He wants the immediate fix, but he also
wants to break his habit and return to normal life.
The reason we wouldn’t say that getting the fix
makes his life go better overall is that while it
satisfies one desire, it frustrates another, and
probably stronger, desire.
iii. Reply: Not all drug addicts do have that second
desire. Even in the case of a drug addict who lacks
the desire to get better, it doesn’t seem right to say
that getting the heroin shot makes his life go better.
c. Example 2: desires for ever-expanding material wealth
i. Most people desire more money, and more of the
things money can buy: bigger houses, fancier
electronic goods, more expensive clothes, more
meals out etc.
ii. But research (both formal and anecdotal) arguably
suggests that above a certain (and quite low!)
threshold, increasing material wealth doesn’t
actually make people any happier.
1. Having less wealth than other people whose
lives you interact with and/or observe often
makes one unhappy. But the absolute level
of wealth itself seems(?) to be rather
unimportant.
2. (Note: many economists (among others)
would strenuously deny this. Decide where
you stand on this issue!)
iii. Desire-satisfaction theory entails that increasing
someone’s material wealth (provided she wanted
that increase) makes her life go better for her, even
if it fails to make her any happier. Many people
would, at least with the benefit of hindsight, deny
that, even in their own cases.
d. So, even if the desire-satisfaction theorist accepts the
restriction to self-regarding desires, her theory still seems to
get some of the crucial cases wrong.
f. Unified response to these objections: the desires that count, for the purposes of
desire-satisfaction theory, are just the desires for things that are in fact good for us.
i. But that means that the desire-satisfaction ‘theory’ needs to be
supplemented by an independent account of what is good for a person. And
at that point, the appeal to desire-satisfaction is no longer seems to be
doing any work.
g. Comment on the dominance of the preference theory in economics
i. Something like the desire-satisfaction theory appears to dominate much of
the normative (as opposed to descriptive) theorising that goes on in
economics.
ii. Economists construct ‘utility functions’ according to which one state of
affairs has higher ‘utility’ for a given person than another if and only if the
person prefers the first to the second. (We might be comparing, e.g., states
of affairs in which one works for N hours per week, has 168-N hours of
‘leisure’ time and consumes M units of goods and services, for variable
values of M and N.)
1. Note that this is not ‘utility’ in the utilitarian sense of that term.
Utilitarian utility is about happiness, not about preference-
satisfaction.
iii. These utility functions are sometimes used just to make predictions about
what people will in fact do. (‘Descriptive economics.’) For that purpose,
people’s actual preferences are clearly the right thing to use: what people
will in fact do is determined by which preferences they actually have, and
issues of whether those preferences are themselves irrational or misguided
are irrelevant.
iv. But other parts of economics are normative – they are concerned with what
governments (in particular) ought to do. The use of ‘utility’-maximising
principles in normative economics, if by ‘utility’ is meant a quantity that
represents simply the degree to which a person’s preferences are satisfied,
amounts to buying into a desire-satisfaction theory of well-being.
1. An example of such a principle: the Pareto principle
v. ‘Gross national product’ vs ‘gross national happiness’
1. The government of Bhutan seeks to maximise GNH, not GNP. This
appears to be an operationalisation of an hedonistic, as opposed to
a desire-satisfaction, account of well-being.
h. Another worry about the desire-satisfaction theory of individual well-being: Doesn’t
that theory anyway ‘get things backwards’?
i. Suppose you are having the sort of ‘early life crisis’ that many of us
experience around-about our early twenties, when we’re trying to work out
(as we’d normally put it) what’s important, what our values are. You’re not
sure, for instance, whether the good life consists in riches and luxury
(material consumption), achievement, or spiritual enlightenment, and hence
you don’t know, for instance, whether to aim for a career in banking,
research or the monastery. Your desire-satisfaction-theorist friend tries to
reassure you. “The good life is simply getting what you happen to want. So
it’s easy – just introspect to find out what your desires are, and that’ll be the
answer to what’s good for you.” This answer seems to miss the point:
phenomenologically, it seems that what’s going on is rather: you’re trying to
work out on some independent ground what’s important, and once you
have, your desires will then change to track that discovery.
ii. A similar objection could be raised against hedonism. One very important
source of pleasure is living a life that you believe is a good one…
i. On the other hand, the “experience machine” thought-experiment did seem to
provide a good reason for doubting hedonism.
j. This raises the question: Is there any other theory of individual welfare that
i. would support the conclusion that a life in the experience machine is not the
best life for the individual, but also
ii. doesn’t suffer from the problems that desire-satisfaction theory suffers from
either?
k. Objective list theories are supposed to fit the bill...
5. Objective list theory
a. The basic idea of objective list theories: Some things (e.g. knowledge, friendship,
achievement appreciation of beauty) are just good for people, regardless of whether
people desire them and regardless of whether they are causes of pleasure. Other
things (e.g. excessive material consumption, harmful drugs) are not good for people,
even if people desire them.
i. The “objective list” is the list of items that are objectively good for people.
ii. On any plausible version of objective list theory, pleasure/happiness will be
included on the list.
1. Thus objective list theory retains some of the key insights of
hedonism.
2. Hedonism is in fact a special case of objective list theory: hedonists
are those who insist that the list contains only one item, namely
happiness/pleasure.
iii. Other candidates for inclusion on the list:
1. Knowledge/understanding
2. Friendship/other personal relationships
3. Achievement
4. Aesthetic appreciation
5. Autonomy
iv. According to objective list theory, the life in the experience machine is not
the best life for the individual because, although it contains the most
possible pleasure, it is severely deficient in terms of most or all of the other
items on the list.
b. Moore’s version of objective list theory (Principia Ethica, ch. 6; see
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moore-moral/#3 for a helpful summary)
i. Caveat: Moore is actually talking about which things are good overall, rather
than (our current question) what is good-for-particular-people. (Moore’s
own view is that the notion of “good for you”/”good for me” makes no
sense, unless it just means: good, and in addition, contained in your life/in
my life. In Lecture 1, I argued against that: Recall the example of the man
who inadvertently discovered a cure for cancer, but led a miserable life.) But
most of his discussion would go through equally well if it was about what
was good for individual people.
ii. Moore’s methodological test for estimating an object’s intrinsic value: how
much value would that object have if it existed all on its own?
1. Example of the application of this method: Imagine first that no
sentient creatures exist, but that the world is very beautiful. Is that
state of affairs better than, or of equal value to, one in which no
sentient creatures exist and the world is ugly?
a. Moore’s judgment: The beautiful world is better.
b. Conclusion to draw from this: beauty has positive intrinsic
value, even when no sentient creature is aware of it.
2. One point of this method is to prevent judgments of how valuable a
thing is itself (what its ‘final value’ is) from being infected by
knowledge of which other things it tends to bring about. (The values
of the things it brings about contribute to its instrumental value, but
not to its final value.)
a. In the above example, the test enables us to conclude that
beauty has final value, not merely instrumental value.
b. In contrast, Moore thinks that the same test shows that
pleasure on its own has no final value: he thinks that
pleasure has value only insofar as it leads to e.g. awareness
of pleasure.
iii. Moore’s “principle of organic unities”: the value of a “whole” that is made
up of several parts need not be equal to the value of the sum of the parts.
1. Moore’s view on punishment: Vice (a bad state of mind) is
intrinsically bad. And pain is intrinsically bad. But the state of affairs
in which pain is inflicted on a vicious person is not as bad as a simple
summing of the ‘badnesses’ of vice and of pain would lead us to
expect.
2. Even if (contra Moore’s own view) there were no intrinsic value in a
world that contained no pleasure (but did contain e.g. knowledge
and contemplation of beautiful objects), it would not follow that
pleasure is the only valuable thing, still less that the value of a state
of affairs is represented simply by the sum of the values of all the
pleasures it contains. Instead, it could well be that: knowledge and
contemplation of beauty are of no value if unaccompanied by
pleasure, but when they are accompanied by pleasure, the value of
the resulting whole is much greater than the value that the pleasure
would have if it existed all by itself (i.e. not as a response to
knowledge/beauty).
iv. On the contents of Moore’s list (in Principia Ethica – not necessarily in his
later work!)
1. Moore takes the most valuable things to be cases of aesthetic
appreciation of inanimate objects, and cases of ‘personal affection’.
2. In both cases, the valuable thing is a complex whole, consisting of an
object contemplated (e.g. a painting, an opera, another person), a
‘cognition’ (perception) of that object, and an emotional reaction to
that cognition that is appropriate to the object’s qualities.
3. Examples in the aesthetic case:
a. An opera, a hearing of that opera, and a profound sense of
tragedy on contemplating the fate of the opera’s doomed-
lover protagonists.
b. A natural landscape, a sighting of that natural landscape,
and an appreciation of the grandeur of nature.
4. Examples in the personal-affection case:
a. A person with fine aesthetic taste, a second person’s
perception that the first person does have that good taste,
and the second person’s admiring the first on that account.
b. A courageous and compassionate person, and the analogous
two additions.
5. Moore takes many things that would often be accorded prime
position on an “objective list” to have “little or no intrinsic value” in
themselves, although they might contribute to the great value of
certain complex wholes of which they are parts:
a. Pleasure
b. Knowledge
6. Despite thinking that pleasure has very little (positive) intrinsic
value, Moore does think that pain has a large amount of *negative*
intrinsic value: he thinks that there is an asymmetry between
pleasure and pain.
v. Criticisms of Moore’s list
1. In emphasising the value of passive contemplation, Moore fails to
recognise the value of more active forms of interaction with the
world. Examples:
a. Achievement is not on Moore’s list at all.
b. Moore’s account of personal affection is peculiar. It involves
only the “admiring contemplation” of the other person’s
fine qualities, not e.g. any desire for two-way interaction
with the other person (helping him in his projects,
conversing with him, having any physical or sexual
relationship with him).
2. Moore under-rates pleasure. (Relatedly: his claim of a pleasure-pain
asymmetry is implausible.)
3. Some features of the list just seem arbitrary: e.g. it’s weird to
include beauty, but exclude knowledge.
vi. Reply (endorsed by Moore himself): Moore’s discussion is more useful for its
account of what the key questions are and of the method for answering
them, than for the particular answer it suggests.
1. Indeed, Moore himself changed his mind later about several of his
claims regarding what is, and is not, on the list.
c. The paternalism/arrogance objection to objective list theories
i. Consider a person who neither wants nor gains any pleasure from some
item on the objective list theorist’s List.
1. E.g. a hermit with no desire for friendship; an ignoramus with no
interest in learning.
ii. The objective list theorist appears to be committed to saying that we would
make this person’s life better for her if we induced her, against her will, to
form friendships/acquire knowledge/etc.
iii. Objection:
1. This conclusion is objectionably paternalistic. We have no right to
interfere with the person’s life, against her will, in this way.
2. The objective list theorist is intolerably arrogant, in assuming that
his theory of the good is correct even for the person whose own
implicit theory of the good disagrees with that list.
d. Reply to the arrogance objection
i. This objection relies on an implicit premise that disagreeing with someone
implies disrespecting them/behaving arrogantly towards them.
ii. But we don’t normally accept that principle. Some examples outside the
context of goodness/morality:
1. I believe that the Earth is (approximately) round. There exist people
who think that it is flat. I disagree with them: I think that their
beliefs are false. This does not imply that I disrespect them, nor that
I am behaving arrogantly towards them.
2. I believe that there is no God. There exist (many!) people who
believe that there is a God. I think that their religious beliefs are
false, but it doesn’t follow from that that I disrespect them or that I
am arrogant.
3. A scientific example: I believe that the best interpretation of
quantum mechanics is a many-universes theory. Others disagree. I
think that certain of their scientific beliefs are false, but I have the
highest respect for them.
4. Note that in no such case do I need to agree that the Earth is flat
“for” the other person, that there is a God “for” him or that a many-
universes theory is false “for” him, in order to be according him due
respect (unless that talk of “for him” is just a confusing way of
reporting what his beliefs are).
iii. Similarly: The believer in objective list theory is committed to thinking that
the hermit/the ignoramus is missing out on some things that would be good
for him, but it doesn’t follow from this that there is any disrespect or
arrogance going on.
e. Reply to the paternalism objection
i. The claim that e.g. friendship would be good for Joe does not entail the
claim that it would be right for a third party to intervene in Joe’s life, against
Joe’s will, in order to cause Joe to have friendships.
ii. Two reasons why this entailment does not hold
1. On any plausible objective list theory, autonomy is likely to be one
of the key items on the list.
a. A person’s life is better for him, other things being equal, if
he is the author of that life, choosing how to live it in
accordance with his own values.
b. If some of his values are mistaken, then there is a tradeoff
between the sacrifice of autonomy that would be involved
in intervening in the course of his life on the one hand, and
the gain along the other dimensions of well-being that such
intervention might effect.
c. In many cases, the sacrifice of autonomy would be so bad
that the ‘trade’ is not worthwhile: thus, despite the fact that
as things stand Joe e.g. has no friends, we would still make
his life worse overall if we intervened to force a more
sociable lifestyle on him.
2. In any case, claims about what would make someone’s life better do
not immediately entail any claims about what one ought to do to
that person:
a. “What would make someone’s life better”: this is about
what is good for him.
b. “How we should treat him”: this is about what we ought to
do/which ways of treating him would be right/wrong.
c. Questions of which outcomes would be good on the one
hand, and questions of what’s right to do on the other, are
distinct questions.
d. A non-consequentialist (for example) might well think that
even if intervention would make someone’s life go better,
still it would be wrong to intervene, because the person has
a right to live his life the way he chooses, and we have no
right to intervene.
f. A more serious objection to objective list theory
i. Consider the hermit again. Suppose not only that he currently has no desire
for friendship, but also that even if we did intervene to change his lifestyle
and brought it about that he had several genuinely close friendships, he
would still take no pleasure in those friendships, and would spend his days
thinking wistfully back to the hermit lifestyle he was wrested from.
ii. Or consider the ignoramus. Suppose that we get her through GCSEs and
send her on to university; suppose further that, completely intellectually
reformed, she does quite well at university, and develops quite a deep
understanding of her subject. But suppose that throughout, she takes no
pleasure in any of this, and that, contra Mill, she really would choose to have
remained ignorant if she could turn the clock back.
iii. Intuitively, it just doesn’t seem plausible to insist that the lives of these two
characters have been improved by the addition of the “missing” goods from
the objective list, given that they are not enjoying and do not want
possession of those goods. Here, the hedonist and desire-satisfaction
theories that we have (tentatively) rejected seem to have captured an
important insight that the objective-list theory lacks.
6. Hybrid theories (Some suggestions of this in Moore; see also Parfit, Reasons and Persons,
pp.501-2; Kagan, ‘Well-being as enjoying the good’, Philosophical Perspectives 23, 2009)
a. This last observation provides the motivation for hybrid theories of well-being:
theories that attempt to combine key elements of two or more of the above
theories, in such a way as to capture the successes of each theory while avoiding the
objections to any non-hybrid theory.
b. One hybrid suggestion is: well-being is made up of two components, both of which
need to be present in order for the person to be well off. First, one must possess
something that is objectively good. Second, one must enjoy possessing that thing.
On this theory:
i. The person in the experience machine is not well-off because she does not
possess most of the objective goods.
ii. The manipulated hermit is not well-off because, although he possesses many
objective goods, he is not enjoying them.
c. Kagan’s paper helpfully surveys some of the considerations that one will need to
deal with in order to develop a fully worked-out version of this sort of theory.
Lecture 3: The theory of the good and the criterion of right action
7. Structural comments:
a. Many people (not all!) see ethics as having a three-part structure:
i. Theory of individual welfare: What makes a person’s life go well for her?
(Discussed in the previous two lectures.)
ii. Theory of the (overall) good: Given an answer to the first question, what
makes one state of affairs better than another overall?
iii. Criterion of right action: Given an answer to the first and second questions,
what does it take for an action to be right/wrong?
b. This lecture tackles the second, and starts to tackle the third, of these.
8. Overall goodness
a. It’s natural to think that increasing the extent to which people’s lives go well for
them is at least part of improving the state of affairs overall.
b. Welfarism is the (more controversial) thesis that the overall goodness of a state of
affairs is entirely determined by how well the lives lived in it go for the people who
live them.
c. Some reasons to doubt welfarism
i. One might hold a view of well-being according to which living one’s life
autonomously is no part of what makes one’s life go well for oneself – that
is, that autonomy is no part of well-being – but nevertheless think that a
state of affairs in which persons live their lives autonomously is much better
than a state of affairs in which persons are entirely controlled by outside
forces, but have the same welfare levels.
1. This is probably not a very convincing objection, since if you really
did value autonomy in any such way, you probably *would* have
included it in your account of well-being in the first place.
ii. One might hold that the mere existence of certain things – for instance,
great works of art, or well-functioning intact ecosystems – is good in itself,
quite independently of any contribution those things make to the well-being
of any human or animal.
d. There are several varieties of welfarism (since to say that A determines B is not to
say how A determines B).
i. Utilitarianism: The overall goodness of a state of affairs is just the sum of
people’s well-being levels.
e. A common objection to the utilitarian theory of the good is that, in paying attention
only to total welfare, it ignores the importance of the distribution of welfare
amongst persons.
f. Some alternatives:
i. Prioritarianism: The contribution that an extra unit of well-being makes to
overall goodness depends on the existing well-being level of the person it
accrues to: its contribution is greater if it accrues to a less well off person.
(“Well-being has diminishing marginal overall value.”)
ii. (Welfare-)Egalitarianism: Other things being equal, a state of affairs is better
if it involves a more equal distribution of well-being among persons.
(“Equality is intrinsically important.”)
iii. The distinction between prioritarianism and egalitarianism is a bit subtle. In
the final analysis, it turns out to be a technical issue, and one that will not
concern us in this course.
g. However, even if the utilitarian’s theory of overall good was replaced by a
prioritarian or egalitarian one, most of the most interesting objections to the theory
would still remain, since they are objections either to hedonism or to the utilitarian’s
criterion of right action.
9. Criterion of right action
a. To say which state of affairs is best is not immediately to say anything about what
anyone ought to do.
b. Maximising act-consequentialism
i. Criterion of right action: An act X is right iff (that is: if and only if), of all acts
that were available to the agent at the time of action, X leads to the best
consequences; otherwise it is wrong.
ii. Simple examples
1. In the classic ‘trolley problems’ (see, e.g., Thomson, “Killing, letting
die, and the trolley problem”), maximising act-consequentialism
always holds that killing the one (or letting the one die) in order to
save the five is right, and that the alternative course of action would
be wrong.
2. In ‘white-lie’ cases, maximising act-consequentialism might
recommend either telling the lie or telling the truth, depending on
how it ranks the goodness of knowledge vs avoidance of discomfort
in its theory of the good.
a. Contrast with this maximising act-consequentialism:
i. an ‘absolute deontological’ theory according to
which it is simply wrong to lie, regardless of the
consequences;
ii. a non-absolute deontological theory, according to
which the wrongness of lying is such that sometimes
one should not lie even though the consequences
would be a bit better if one did.
iii. Some more complex examples
1. On vegetarianism:
a. Act-consequentialism would be concerned with what the
consequences of one’s eating this particular piece of meat
would be on (i) the number of animals who are killed, (ii) the
number of animals who are born, (iii) the welfare of those
animals who do live, during their lives.
b. It would therefore probably recommend eating some types
of meat but not others, and would recommend eating meat
in some circumstances but not others.
2. On abortion:
a. Act-consequentialism would weigh up (i) the goodness of
the life that the foetus would go on to have if it lived, for the
person that the foetus would become, (ii) the extent to
which that life would benefit or harm others (for example, if
the foetus goes on to discover a cure for cancer, or commits
mass murder) in general, (iii) the effect on the mother’s
quality of life in particular, (iv) the effects on how many
other children the mother goes on to have in the future, (v)
issues arising from the fact that the foetus, if allowed to life,
would itself be quite likely eventually to have children.
b. It would therefore probably permit some abortions but not
others, depending on how factors (i)—(iv) pan out in the
individual case in question.
3. Obviously, these issues are complex. But arguably, that’s not act-
consequentialism’s fault – it’s no virtue of a theory to take difficult,
complex questions, and pretend that they’re simple.
c. Objections to maximising act-consequentialism
i. Cluelessness objection:
1. The objection: One never knows, at the time of action, what all the
consequences of one’s action will be. Therefore one never knows, at
the time of making one’s decision, whether a given action will be
right or wrong according to this theory. So:
a. The act-consequentialist criterion is useless as guidance to
the decision-making agent; and
b. It’s inappropriate to blame someone for doing something
that is ‘wrong’ in the act-consequentialist sense.
2. Examples:
a. The case of abortion, sketched above.
b. More general point: All of our actions have enormous
numbers of possible long-run consequences that we can’t
possibly predict.
i. Analogy: a butterfly flapping its wings in Texas can
cause a storm in Bangladesh
ii. Human-action cases: Stopping to let a stranger past
might cause her later to be run over by a bus, or to
fail to get the job she is being interviewed for, or not
to meet the person who would have been her life
partner...
3. Reply, part 1: All this is correct, but it doesn’t mean that the act-
consequentialist criterion has no place in moral theory.
a. The criterion does not itself say anything about how one
should make one’s decisions, or when to blame someone.
These could be the tasks of some part of moral theory other
than the criterion of right action.
i. One might well want to say, e.g. of a white lie that
was unfortunately seen through, “telling that lie
turned out to be the wrong thing to do (although
James can’t be blamed for telling it, since he
couldn’t have known that at the time).”
b. Reasonable principles linking wrongness to blame might be,
e.g.:
i. If someone does something while knowing that it is
wrong, then he is blameworthy for having
performed that action.
ii. If someone does something having made no effort
to find out whether it is wrong or not, then he is
blameworthy for being morally reckless.
c. (Question: Does a criterion of right action that is subject to
the ‘cluelessness’ objection have any important place in
moral theory? If so, what exactly is its place?)
4. Reply, part 2: We can distinguish between objective and subjective
criteria of right action.
a. An act is right in the objective sense iff it in fact leads to the
best overall consequences; otherwise it is wrong in the
objective sense.
b. An act is right in the subjective sense iff the agent believed
that it would lead to the best overall consequences;1
otherwise it is wrong in the subjective sense.
c. Suggestion: An agent is blameworthy if he performs an act
that is wrong in the subjective sense.
ii. The demandingness objection
1. The canonical example:
a. I can save a child’s life by giving £1400 to a (carefully
chosen) charity. According to some estimates, I can keep a
child in primary school for an extra year by giving as little as
£2. (Source: www.givingwhatwecan.org)
b. Clearly, this money will do more good if I give it to the
charities concerned than if I spend it on myself.
i. The basic reason for this is what economists call the
diminishing marginal utility of money.
c. Suppose, then, that I decide to give £1000 a year to these
charities.
d. It will still be true that I would do much more good by giving
another £1 to charity than by spending it on myself...
e. Until I am as poor as the world’s poorest.
1Better: if its expected moral value, relative to the credences that the agent held at the time of the decision, is
highest. ‘Expected moral value’ here is a probability-weighted sum of the goodnesses of the possible resultingstates of affairs (cf. ‘expected utility theory’ in economics).
f. So maximising act-consequentialism (whether subjective or
objective) requires me to give virtually all my money to
charity??
i. And also to spend all my spare time earning as much
money as I can in order to give more, at the expense
of spending any time with family and friends, having
any hobbies, just relaxing, etc.
g. This seems too demanding. Doesn’t it?
i. If morality does not in fact demand this much, then
both the objective and the subjective act-
consequentialist criteria of rightness must be
incorrect.
2. Possible replies:
a. Accept the objection – change the criterion of rightness.
b. Argue that act-consequentialism does not in fact require this
much of agents.
c. Accept that morality really is this demanding, and that
virtually everything we currently do is morally wrong.
iii. The objection from deontological side-constraints
1. Example 1: The Sheriff
a. Suppose that a sheriff in a small town in South America is
faced with a spate of violent crimes. The majority of the
townspeople believe that Joe Bloggs, who happens to be in
the sheriff’s cells at this moment on a minor public disorder
charge, is the culprit. The sheriff knows that Bloggs is not
the culprit. But he also knows that he has no hope of
catching the real culprit, and that unless he publicly hangs
someone for the violent crimes, the townspeople will riot –
and that the riots will lead to several deaths of innocent
people. He knows that if he does hang Bloggs, Bloggs’
innocence will never be discovered, so that there will be no
adverse consequences in terms of e.g. reduced respect for
the institutions of law and order. Should the Sheriff hang Joe
Bloggs, or not?
2. Example 2: Organ harvesting
a. Suppose that a doctor has five patients, each of whom
urgently needs the transplant of a (different) organ. If they
don’t get these transplants, they will all die within a few
days, but the prospects for finding tissue matches on that
timescale are extremely slim. That day, however, a healthy
patient comes in for a blood test, and the doctor happens to
notice that this patient is a perfect tissue match for all five
of the critically ill patients. Suppose that there are no
dangers associated with the transplant operations, so that
the doctor knows that if he were to kidnap and kill this one
patient, he would certainly be able to save the lives of the
other five. Suppose further that nobody would ever discover
the kidnap, and that the doctor knows this. Should he
abduct and kill the healthy patient?
3. Objection: According to act-consequentialism, the sheriff is not only
morally permitted, but is morally required, to hang the innocent Joe
Bloggs. Similarly, the doctor is morally required to harvest organs
from the innocent blood-test patient. But in fact these agents are
not even permitted to do these actions (they would be wrong).
Therefore act-consequentialism’s criterion of right action is false.
4. A possible avenue of reply: in realistic versions of these cases, the
consequences of killing the One would not in fact be best overall,
once all long-run effects are taken into account.
a. There’s a high chance that the word would get out that
sheriffs/doctors (resp.) behave this way. And the
consequences of that would be
i. A decreased respect for the forces of law and order;
ii. People would avoid going into hospitals, whether as
patients or as visitors, except in situations of direst
need.
b. This sort of line of thought might show that in practice
maximising act-consequentialism does not require the
problematic acts. But the act-consequentialist still has to
agree that in ‘pure’ versions of these cases (i.e., in which the
sheriff/doctor can be absolutely sure that no-one else will
hear of what he has done, and that his own character will
not be adversely affected by performing the act in
question), then the theory’s implications are as the objector
claims.
i. Question: How bad is that?
iv. The integrity objection
1. Example: George’s job choice
a. “George, who has just taken his PhD in chemistry, finds it
extremely difficult to get a job. He is not very robust in
health, which cuts down the number of jobs he might be
able to do satisfactorily. His wife has to go out to work to
keep them, which itself causes a great deal of strain, since
they have small children and there are severe problems
about looking after them. The results of all of this, especially
on the children, are damaging. An older chemist, who knows
about this situation, says that he can get George a decently
paid job in a certain laboratory, which pursues research into
chemical and biological warfare. George says that he cannot
accept this, since he is opposed to chemical and biological
warfare. The older man replies that he is not too keen on it
himself, but after all George’s refusal is not going to make
the job or the laboratory go away; what is more, he happens
to know that if George refuses the job, it will certainly go to
a contemporary of George’s who is not inhibited by any
such scruples and is likely if appointed to push along the
research with greater zeal than George would. Indeed, it is
not merely concern for George and his family, but (to speak
frankly and in confidence) some alarm about this other
man’s excess of zeal, which has led the older man to offer to
use his influence to get George the job... George’s wife, to
whom he is deeply attached, has views (the details of which
need not concern us) from which it follows that at least
there is nothing particularly wrong with research into CBW.
What should he do?” (Williams, ‘A critique of utilitarianism’,
in Smart and Williams, Utilitarianism: For & Against, pp.97-
8)
2. Act-consequentialism’s verdict on this case: George ought to take
the job, simply because the consequences of him taking it are better
than the consequences of him not taking it; end of story.
3. Williams’ objection to utilitarianism’s account of such cases: “the
integrity objection”
a. Every agent has a number of (first-order) projects.
i. These include: desires for basics like food, shelter,
physical security, for oneself and for one’s family
and friends; desires for ‘objects of taste’
(furnishings, artwork); an interest in poetry; the
pursuit of philosophy; support of some cause, e.g.
the environment, pacifism, economic equality.
b. On any plausible account of well-being, success in one’s
(valuable/reasonable) projects is a key element of well-
being.
c. So, in particular, the utilitarian has to agree that the
existence of first-order projects is important.
d. The agent obeying utilitarianism must always be guided
(though) by the second-order project of maximising utility.
e. This will sometimes involve acting so as to pursue his own
projects. But utilitarianism will only recommend acting to
pursue one’s own projects when the causal structure of the
situation “just happens” to be such that one can generate
more utility that way than by acting to further others’
projects (or non-project sources of utility) instead.
f. Requiring this degree of distance between an agent and his
own first-order projects “is to alienate him... from his
actions and the source of his action in his own convictions...
It is thus, in the most literal sense, an attack on his
integrity.”
4. Reply to the integrity objection: the utilitarian agent isn’t acting
against (or in a manner unrelated to) his own deepest commitments
if his deepest commitment is to utilitarian moral theory. (Relatedly:
Any other moral theory will face the same issue. Requiring an agent
who does not believe in a given deontological ethical theory to
conform to that theory will equally “alienate that agent from the
source of his action in his own convictions”, but surely the more
important question is what happens to agents who do believe in the
theory in question.)
d. Other forms of act-consequentialism
i. Satisficing act-consequentialism: There is some threshold level of overall
goodness, such that one’s act is right provided its consequences are at least
as good as that threshold, and wrong otherwise.
1. On the demandingness objection: A ‘satisficing’ moral theory is less
demanding than maximising theory (potentially much less
demanding).
2. On deontological side-constraints: This objection applies equally to a
satisficing theory, since the satisficing theory agrees (with the
maximising theory) that one is always at least permitted to being
about the best state of affairs.
ii. Scalar consequentialism: This theory does not provide a criterion of right
action. It simply says that one action is better than another if its
consequences are (overall) better.
1. On the demandingness objection: Scalar consequentialism simply
notes that it is better to give £10 to charity than nothing at all,
better again to give £1000, and best of all to give almost all one’s
money. It is immune to the ‘demandingness objection’ since it does
not make any demands.
2. On side-constraints: Again, scalar consequentialism is equally
vulnerable to this objection, since it agrees that (e.g.) hanging the
innocent man is the best thing the sheriff can do.